Last Post

Depending on how the HMIE feedback at 10am goes, this may be my last post. As such, I'd like to leave you with some thoughts for the weekend. I like the idea from the indigenous peoples of North America, where people are only truly dead when they are forgotten. We have Remembrance Sunday on the 11th. Take the opportunity to remember lost friends and relatives. Remember the good times, and the stupid times; ask the living for the stories about their past, their childhood, their friends and relatives. The past helps us be better people in the future.

Aberdonian, Bob Cooney, wrote a poem remembering his friends who fell below the blood-soaked Spanish Republican flag (full poem, source):

Seven and twenty years? That long?
It seems but yesterday
We left that war torn hill above Gandesa.
Is it perhaps because I'm growing old
That thought now skips so lightly down the years?
And the travail of a quarter century
Melts in the vision of those great days
Those days we lived and knew that we were living

We also say
Hasta La Vista - Madrid!

There is so much we want to see once more
We will stroll in the Puerto del Sol
And the Ramblas of Barcelona
We will cross the Ebro and drink with our friends in Mora
Friends who will be free!
We will look at them and at each other
And each of us will think
"This is why we came in '36"
And if we live to be a hundred
We'll have this to be glad about
We went to Spain!
Because of that great yesterday
We are part of the greater tomorrow